Dr Usman Bugaje was once the national secretary of the opposition Action Congress of Nigeria. He was also the party’s governorship candidate in Katsina State, first in 2007 and again in 2011. In this interview with SHUAIB SHUAIB, he speaks on the trial of ?Bola Tinubu, the stranglehold of the Peoples Democratic Party on the judiciary and the inability of the Jonathan administration to learn from America’s war against terror in Afghanistan by going after Boko Haram with every conceivable arsenal.?
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Former Lagos State governor, Bola Tinubu has said his trial is politically motivated and the PDP is out to persecute him simply for being an opposition leader. ?
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While, I would like to say that what he is saying is obvious, I do not think anybody who lives in this country will have any doubt that all the “so called” anti-corruption institutions are tools in the hands of the executive to pursue those people that it thinks are its enemies and it is going to bring down. This is a statement which hardly needs any proof. But because there is a tendency for some people to dismiss it, let me say what I had already written earlier. If you look at the PDP chairman, from the last acting chairman, the chairman before him, and the one before that one, three successive chairmen if you like, all of them have one case or another in one of the anti-corruption agencies. It is either Siemens or the national ID card fraud, or it is something else.
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These people have been taken to court or at least the issue has been raised in one of these anti-corruption agencies. But what have you heard about the matter? You can clearly see that there are people who ought to be prosecuted and sent to jail, these cases have lingered for nearly five years, nobody has done anything and then suddenly, you are pursuing other people. And this particular case, if indeed it was true, look at the number of years he has spent since he left office, it has been four years. Nobody ever thought about bringing him to book. Could it be that he is the only officer at his own level, that really committed this so called crime? What about the PDP governors? Were they complying with this particular law or not? ? So, to a lot of these questions, the answers will easily point to the fact that the PDP federal government is consistently selective in its anti-corruption pursuit. It is not being done dispassionately, honestly, objectively and in the national interest. There are many PDP big wigs with so much corruption charges against them and yet, they are being left to go scot-free. Some of course have been taken to court and that is the last we have heard.
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They have been let out on bail. God knows how many of these people are there. And they bring out those that they feel are a thorn in their flesh. You know what they did with the el Rufai case, and you come back and ask yourself, $16 billion was spent on the power sector. The House did a probe on it. They established the fact that this money had been spent and that nothing has come out of it. In other words, not a single megawatt has been increased. Where is the money? Who are the culprits? We have not heard anything. A lot of them are PDP people and the head of them is Obasanjo, and he has not been brought to book. So, how can you convince anybody that the PDP government is really out to fight corruption? The PDP government is using this opportunity selectively to fight those they perceive as their enemies. ??
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You say it’s selective, do you think that is enough justification for justice not to be sought in this particular case??
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Certainly not. But you know, I would not want to comment more on this because I understand it is already in court and I think we are restricted to discuss it because it would be ?sub-judice. But I certainly can tell you right away that that is no excuse for justice not to be done. But it is not enough that justice is done. It is necessary that justice is seen to be done. And for the government to really make justice seen to be done, they have to apply the scale across board, not selective. That is because selective justice is no justice. ?
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There has been a crisis in our judiciary where the ACN as a political party has featured prominently. ACN has been accused of dining with judges and at times even paying for judgments. Are party leaders influencing judges??
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Who is accusing ACN of doing this? Can they provide the evidence? This question is for the PDP. Let them go and provide evidence that a judge has been paid by the ACN to deliver judgment. When they provide the evidence, then we can take them on. But certainly, PDP will be the last to talk about anything. Look at what the president did in the case of Justice Salami. His case was in court. The president ignored the court processes which is a terrible disrespect for the rule of law, which is in fact a real slap on the judiciary, and then you went ahead to decide in a controversial circumstance like this one. Look at the National Judicial Council, NJC itself. Go back to the third schedule of the constitution. This is a 19 member board. 14 members are being appointed by the Chief Justice of Nigeria himself. The Chief Justice is himself subject to the NJC. Now, how can justice be obtained in this particular circumstance? These are the questions you in the press should be raising. But certainly, if PDP have made this claim, they should be able to justify if otherwise they will be taken to court for slander and character assassination. ?You just can’t come and make an irresponsible statement like this without evidence. ??
Revelations from WikiLeaks also suggest that the PDP and the presidency are constantly making attempts to pay off judges in both the Supreme Court and Appeal Court to influence verdicts on election cases.
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?You just came out of an election case at the tribunal. Do you think you got a fair hearing? ?
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Let me first say that we do not need WikiLeaks to know that the PDP is influencing judges. We may not have the hard kind of evidence where a judge would have signed and collected money, but all the circumstantial ?evidences that we have, point to the fact that the judiciary has been influenced, using whatever to get judgments that are favourable and the case of Sokoto is a very clear case. Here is a judgment that the PDP or some people claimed that it has leaked.Okay, if it had leaked, does it mean it was no longer a judgment? Why should it be arrested if there is no higher interest in this particular case? Look at the case of Mark. Look at what is happening right now. The first thing the new acting President of the Court of Appeal did was to dismantle the whole structure. If indeed they are confident that they do not need any interference, why don’t they allow the structure to continue? ?These are certified judges. They are expected to deliver justice, why change them? One of the first things they did to the Congress for Progressive Cange, CPC was to stop the court from accepting their evidences and to reinterpret a ruling that had been given earlier allowing CPC to access and make copies of INEC materials. Now, if you access and you cannot make copies, how do you confront the judge? How do you go to court and say this is my own finding as different from what the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC is telling you or different from what the PDP candidate is telling you? So, these are circumstantial evidence that show we do not need WikiLeaks to know that our judges are under very serious inducement, influence and manipulation by the PDP government. The circumstantial evidences point to this. Look at the cases that they have dismissed, all of them are on technical grounds. And they reinterpret the rules of the whole game to show; oh you are out of time. I do not have to list all these cases, we all know them, we read about them. ?
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In your case against the governorship election in Katsina, where your petition was dismissed for failing to file a pre-hearing notice within the stipulated time frame, do you believe that justice was delivered? ?
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Let me make it clear, I, as Usman Bugaje, I did not go to court. It was my party, having seen the report that we wrote, and submitted on the way the election went, was convinced that this is a case that is worth challenging and I am prepared to give the party whatever cooperation I can. But it was the party that has gone to court and I believe we had a very serious case. This is not the first time I went through an election and something like this happened. In 2007, a similar thing happened. I did not go to court. 2011, a worse thing happened and the party thought this time, we have to go to court and I was prepared to. If you read the dismissal, it was all on an issue of two or three days difference. The way our lawyers did the counting was the way they understood the guidelines, the practice guidelines that were issued. Some of these guidelines may have been deliberately crafted to read both ways which will now give the judge, if he so wishes, to hide behind those guidelines and count the days differently. It is like saying you count working days and somebody includes the weekends, because the courts do not sit on weekends. So, you do this and do not look at the substance of the case. That in itself is injustice. If it is a difference of two, three days, if there is substance in the case, you should ignore these number of days and address justice. You can’t say because somebody had filed papers, and in any case our lawyers must have argued on the actual service itself. I knew when the letters got to the lawyers, it was several days later. They delivered it to a wrong office and deliberately so, and before we realized the letters were there, we lost time. These are all deliberate. They would of course, say this is the address, but they know it’s wrong. ? In this country, whether you provide hard evidence to go to court or you do not, everybody who lives in this country knows that the judges, the police and the other security agencies are in an unholy alliance with the PDP government. I mean, you will find a few judges that are out of this thing, but certainly they must be few. But they are there and it must have been beyond them to change the practice or do something else. But some of them, when they get the opportunity, they demonstrate their independence. That is in the few cases. And because PDP pays for this thing, when these independent judges give judgment against the PDP, their assumption, stupidly is that, oh because we have paid our own, these ones also must have been paid by the ACN, or by the CPC, or by the ANPP or by the Labour or any other opposition party. They just assume that because that is the way they think, that is the way they behave, that is their way of life.?
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To the election itself, the failure of the opposition parties to get PDP voted out has been blamed on the absence of an alliance between Muhammadu Buhari of the CPC and Bola Tinubu of ACN. What went wrong between them??
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Have we actually failed? You are assuming that the opposition has failed to vote out the PDP. This is the issue in court. The CPC is contesting that Gen Buhari won the election. The ACN can lay the same claim. But whichever way it is, if you look at the results in Bayelsa, look at the results in the South eastern states, there is nowhere in the world that such results can come. In a whole state, only two people actually failed to turn out. And all those that voted, voted Jonathan. Somebody whose house was burnt a few years back and whose disagreement with the current governor came out in the open. You mean he will get 100 per cent. Does it make sense? The idea that the PDP has been voted in, which is what you are saying, is itself contestable. So, I cannot answer this question because it is predicated on an assumption that I do not believe and is clearly wrong. ??
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With the violence that followed the election, it has been suggested that northern leaders in general from all the parties were responsible for this because they had created an atmosphere of north versus south and it was only natural that violence would follow if their candidates were not elected. Was this how it was? ?
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I do not buy this. It is a very irresponsible over simplification. Look at the pattern, and look at the time results were announced and the reaction. It was spontaneous. It was not something that people sat and planned. You can see what was driving this, it was the rigging that the PDP did that elicited and provoked people to act the way they acted. No one will justify the kind of action that has taken place. But if you cannot justify it, you cannot fail to explain and see the reasons that led to those kind of unfortunate incidences. I sadly will not condone this kind of barbaric behaviour, but I absolutely understand when people are angry, when this anger was provoked by the kind of rigging that we have not seen before, when security agencies connive with the PDP government to rob people of their mandate and these people are not as informed as some of us, and are not as educated. They did not see all the options that you and me can see, and they reacted when provoked by these incidences. It was an angry and mob reaction which is sad. But you can see why it was there. ? I do not know why people consistently try to find other explanations other than the fact that it was the rigging by the PDP that provoked all the violence. Nobody should be blamed for the violence other than the PDP who, in the first place, committed massive rigging, including the use of traditional rulers. You can see where people were directing their anger. Nobody was asking people to do this, they just simply went on rampage because they could not contain the kind of rigging, especially when INEC had given the impression that things were going to be better this time. INEC failed, it failed people. One would have expected that there would have been processes and procedures before these results were announced. But in Katsina for example, where I participated in the election, you will see that out of the 34 local governments, in 30 of them, there were no boxes displayed for people to vote. And then you just hear the results. What do you expect the people to do? Simply keep quiet and do nothing? And if they react violently, whose fault was it? How can you absolve the men who did the rigging in the first place and start looking for shadows of somebody doing this, somebody doing that. I do not buy that crap. I hold the PDP entirely and completely responsible for the violence we have seen. ?
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The violence has actually continued in the form of Boko Haram and some people are suggesting that Boko Haram is ?a tool in the hand of politicians to weaken the government of President Goodluck Jonathan. What do you think? ?
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That is silly. It is absolutely rubbish. What we call Boko Haram, they have their own proper name, Jamaatu Ahlis Sunna Lid daa’awati wal Jihad. They have made clear their objectives and this is not the first time they have existed, They had existed before. They have been in Yobe before, they went to Maiduguri. Yes, they had some association, We do not yet know the details with the former governor of Borno, Ali Modu Sheriff. What they did with them is bring the kind of insecurity they should have investigated and inform the Nigerian public what transpired. What they said and complained of was that the extra-judicial killing, the way they ravaged the community and they have been making statements. So, why should anybody say that somebody is using Boko Haram. It is not an organisation that you can just manipulate and use. You can see what is happening. Some of the immediate victims are the people living with them who are not politicians. You can see where they are targeting their violence, at the security agencies, and those that they feel ought to do something to stop the kind of things they are against. I think we should try to understand who are the group that we call Boko Haram and what exactly is propelling them into doing the kind of things that they are doing. Unless we really sit down, the idea of sending ?police, sending the army is a stupid way of solving it. The police and the army should have a role of taking the necessary steps to protect people but that does not stop terrorism. It has never stopped terrorism. ? The Americans spent 10 years in Afghanistan fighting terrorism. You know what is happening today. Afghanistan is still not stable. And not just the Americans, NATO and all the Western forces concentrated all the energy in the last 10 years fighting what would appear to be a rag tag guerrilla army and at the end, they have all come back on their knees trying to negotiate with these people. Just three or four days ago, the chief negotiator was himself killed. So, I think we are underestimating the threat that we are facing and it looks like we are not utilizing the experiences of other people around the world who have dealt with this issue. ?When Bush started his fight against Taliban or Al Qaeda, he gave the impression that America would crush them in a matter of two or three years. Now it has been ten years. And the battle is as fresh as it was, in fact more fierce. Now, even Karzai does not control Kabul. Previously he could or whatever administration that was there could protect Kabul. Kabul is a battle ground. I think our security forces or the government directing them has no clue of what we are facing and they do not seem to me to have the capacity to deal with the threat. The first step is to understand it in the first place. They do not appear to have understood what is happening. They have the tools to do the investigation, to find out, to inform the nation. In democratic governance, you do not hide some of these information. Yes, there are certain levels of information that you keep confidential for the purpose of your operations, but certainly the public needs to know. ??
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It has been said that the West went into Libya strictly for the oil. President Jonathan has been accused of supporting them blindly while South Africa appears to have different views. Do you think the president was wrong to have recognize the transition government in Libya? ?
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It is not a question of right or wrong. I do not think the leadership of this country, especially the executive arm of government, understand their own country, much less the countries around them. I do not think they have the capacity. They do not seem to understand Nigeria itself. This is a country with 68 million young people. Ninety per cent of whom are out there, either looking for jobs to do, looking for schools to go or looking for one thing or the other and the government is not making any provision. They just talk, talk and talk and there is nothing on the ground. They spend so much money on what they call security, I do not know how they spend this huge amount of money, you do not see any effect in what they do. So, if you do not understand your own country, how can you understand other countries? As for the accusation of the West, they are out for oil, you forget about the other internal dimension. For the West to do what they want to do, there must be some agents within the country to work with. NATO forces were supporting the rebels. They may have interest in the oil, but there are people within the country that genuinely wanted to free themselves from the dictatorship of Gadhafi who had held on to power for 42 years without proper democratic elections being held. I do not think we should lose sight of that. It will be unfair to the Libyan people, if all we see in Libya is NATO’s interest in oil which is there. It may well be true. But I think when you talk of Libya, you talk of the sufferings of the people for 42 years under dictatorship. ? After the capture of Tripoli, look at the lavish life style of a man who posed in front of the world as honest, sincere, austere, prudent, nationalist, patriotic. How can he be living like that. All these underground palaces that they showed on television, which are real. NATO, America, they do not hide the pursuit of their own national interests. Americans will tell you that one of the major national interests is oil. They need this supply of oil to maintain their industries and keep their economic machine working. So, if they do so, it is understandable. I am not saying it is justifiable. But we understand this because this is what moves countries. What is the national interest of Nigeria? Who stops the country from pursuing its own national interest? Yes, they do not seem to be going with South Africa. South Africa is informed by the role Gadhafi played in the liberation struggle of the African National Congress, ANC and they wanted to show appreciation for this, so you can understand their own context. What Nigeria ought to have done, whichever position it was taking as a leader in Africa, was to have consulted and be able to generate and aggregate the views that will sway the African Union, AU into taking a united stand. They did not wait. They went ahead. This shows really, lack of consultation or lack of ability to manage the international sphere, especially the African one.
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There are agitations for United Nations to increase the number permanent members in the Security Council and most likely, a seat could be coming to Africa. The South Africans appear to be running a more organised campaign to get this seat at the expense of Nigeria. What is our own government doing wrong? ?
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Honestly, the question is a little presumptuous because you are presuming that we have a government. I have my doubts. Yes, we have people who claim to be in government, but I have not seen a government that is up and running. And until you have that, even this question for me is not relevant. When you do not have a government that is worth the name, that is really up and running, attending to the needs of its own people, having an image of respect in the international community and ensuring that they are responsible to govern. When you do not have all these, the question of what they have done wrong or whether they are going to get the seat does not really arise. I do not think the international community respects Nigeria, not with the kind of leadership that we have, I do not think so. ?
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The presidency is proposing to make constitutional changes and has suggested a six-year single tenure. What is your opinion on this idea??
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It is rubbish, absolute rubbish and it is an insult to the Nigerian citizen whose priority is not single term, double term or whatever term. The vast majority of Nigerians require power, they require employment or ways of getting food on their table. They require security. These are the three major issues facing this country that any responsible government should be tackling, not this rubbish. How does that help the ordinary person, whether he spends six-year single term, it just shows that they are not in sync with the whole country. It just shows that they are completely oblivious of what is happening in their own country. It shows that they are actually irresponsible. With the pressing needs here, you cannot go on pursuing inconsequential, ideas that do not add any value to anybody. ?
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As a politician and member of the opposition ACN, where does your future lie, what are your plans for the future??
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My plans for the future is going to be decided by the people of Katsina. And until they say so, I will not be able to tell you what is going to happen.?